Field of the Invention
At least one embodiment in accordance with the present invention relates generally to systems and methods for designing, monitoring and operating co-location electrical critical building systems including data centers, and more specifically, to systems and methods for optimizing the design of co-location centers.
Discussion of Related Art
Due to complexities and economies of scale, companies typically outsource management of local data centers to co-location (or colocation) centers. Co-location centers provide space, power, cooling, and physical security for server, storage, and networking equipment of other companies. Co-location centers may also provide a variety of telecommunications and network services with a minimum of cost and complexity. Outsourcing to co-location centers may provide significant benefits, for example, higher reliability due to redundant systems, full time monitoring and security and lower network latency and higher bandwidth at a lower cost. Outsourcing to co-location centers may further allow companies to save money on information technology (IT) support by diverting IT personnel to other tasks. The popularity of co-location centers has forced co-location companies to continually expand co-location buildings and centers. With this additional expansion, co-location operators focus on providing reliable, low cost systems whose use can be accurately partitioned and billed to the customer.